with ash in your mouth
by but seriously
Summary: Let me tell you the story of a man with stones for eyes and a girl who leapt through time. He chases her for a hundred, three hundred, five hundred years, and sometimes—sometimes—they meet in the middle, with blood in their throats and ash in their mouth. Not very romantic, Katherine says with a cynical little smile, but it works.


ishi was bugging me into writing kalijah, so i did. hugely hugely hugely inspired by dj's (flesh and bone telephone, my main ho and partner in crime) fantastic oneshot "thirteen teethmarks". it's beautiful and makes me cry every time.

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**with ash in your mouth**

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On Thanksgiving Lila comes over and in the spring Owen from three doors down helps her with her tulips and her heathers. They die just a week after that, wilting in their pots and withering down into the dirt, but she throws them out and uproots them with her bare hands and buys fake plastic trees instead. The go well next to her big empty fish tank, she thinks, so she arranges colourful throw rugs around the room and puts a welcome mat outside her door and calls it home.

At night, when she sits on her porch with long fingers wrapped around a mug of warm blood (because Katherine Pierce with her dark eyeliner and leather jackets doesn't sleep, no—Katerina with toes wet from dewy grass and lips crushed red with berries slept through the summer nights, and Katherine would rather not think of what came next) she thinks of fir trees and silver ornaments, garlands and ribbons and turkey roasting in the oven. Maybe she'll have Lila over again for Christmas, she thinks.

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Sometimes at night Elijah is there, waiting for her on her porch. She stands, tense, just outside her garden (with the dried grass and sparse bushes; how Katerina would click her tongue and fret her pretty little head of curls, but not Katherine, no), her stilettoes toeing the pavement beneath them.

The streetlamps flicker and for a moment she considers stepping into the pool of light, chin up, shoulders back, to look into the eyes of the madman who murdered her family, the madman who whispered words she can barely remember into the curve of her jaw, the madman who painted her skin with his fingertips, the madman who made her gasp and cry and curl and arch and—

The floorboards beneath Elijah's shiny Italian shoes creak as he turns, but he won't see her staring from the darkness. He'll wait, she knows, but she also knows that when she returns come daybreak he won't be there.

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Christmas comes and Christmas goes.

Lila comes knocking with freshly baked muffins, but Katherine isn't there to open the door.

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People come out of hibernation in the spring. Their blood is a slash of red across her mouth as she goes nights drinking, flirting, laughing. Owen holds his hand out, his voice unheard over the pounding music, but she takes it and lets him spin her around. He's clumsy with his dopey smile and stuttering words, with his eye for flowers and his fingers grasping at her hair as she bites into his neck.

Lavender, he'll say as she pulls away. He's slow, too slow for her cutting eyes and sharp lines. Maybe Katerina would have liked him.

You smell like lavender, he shouts over the music, and lowers his hands down her sides.

(She thinks of another set of hands, grazing her back and setting her skin alight, of hands pulling her through misty gardens and cupping her face, of hands grasping her father's head and wrenching it from his body.)

(Katerina has—_had_—bad judgement.)

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I think Owen likes you, Lila says over tea. She's knitting Katherine a scarf for Fall, seasons too early, and if it weren't for the fact that Lila had the sweetest blood for miles around, rich and potent sliding down her throat, she would have gouged her eyes out with her own knitting needles.

She wants to lean back and tell the story of a man with dark hair and stone eyes, of a man who didn't believe in love but lured it out of her. She wants to tell the story of how the man, before he hunted her for five hundred years, had the power to make Katerina lower her eyes and smile, perhaps tuck a curl behind her ear; maybe offer a shy flutter of eyelashes. But Katerina then Katerina died, the poor barefoot girl with nettles in her hair, hung by her own hand in an empty room with dusty walls. The broken pawn knocked out of the chessboard. She wants to tell the story of a man who turned a barefooted girl with rosy cheeks and nettles in her hair into cinder and smoke, ashes in the ground.

Katherine Pierce smiles big and crosses her legs, slow and feline, and says, "Let's hope he knows what he's doing."

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Spring ends and the air changes.

It's too hot at night and her clothes stick to her body, and she still sees Elijah on her porch, but knows he won't enter so long as she stands behind her curtains, still and quiet like a thief in the night.

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Owen is there in the summer, messing about with freesias and carnations this time. He gushes about maintenance and landscaping and calling his nephews in to help on weekdays while she drinks from his neck, long and deep, and _God_ she wants him to shut up; she hates this insipid little town with its insipid little inhabitants, wants to break their necks and lick their blood off her fingers, wants to burn it all down and move to another town and maybe have a pet goldfish.

She'll have dogs too, she decides, blood in her mouth. Like the Karakachans Katerina had, lapping at her face with their wagging tongues and wet noses. She'll have cows and goats and live in a big old farmhouse with the mountains blue in the distance. She'll drink her own milk and churn her own butter, make everything with her own goddamn hands, live alone in big old house.

Mountains, she reminds herself as she swallows, feeling herself flush from the amount of blood she's had. Blue in the distance, she thinks, crumpling down to her knees. She wants to cry but doesn't, instead wrapping her arms around her knees and drawing them to her chest. Owen, pale-faced and weak, whispers a stuttering _I love you_.

She reaches a hand out, traces the blood trail down his neck, watches him send her a warm smile that reaches all the way into his eyes before she snatches the life out of them.

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Lila, shoulders shaking and coat wet from the rain has left long ago, so it's just Katherine and Owen in a box, six feet under.

Her black umbrella keeps the rain out of her eyes as she looks down at his tombstone. "Love is a doing word," she says, a final reminder, and throws a rose down with a lazy flick of her wrist.

"Is it, Katerina?"

She'd been expecting him. The rain falls down in sheets of blue and grey around him, and she idly wonders how much dry-cleaning would cost for a fine, sharp suit like that.

"It was for me." She looks at Elijah with dry eyes, and wonders how her toes would feel with the wet grass between them. Wonders how her breath would catch if she ran circles around him, tries to remember his big hands hovering about her waist, fingers sweeping, never trapping.

If I catch you, he'd said, the game would be over.

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Elijah steps closer.

He's the sun and she's Icarus, overwhelmed by the thrill of the never-ending sky, flying too close to his bright stone eyes; losing her wings and falling to the sea.

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Cinder and smoke, she tells Lila flatly. That's what I am.

Squeezing through cracks and falling through his fingers. Fire turns to ashes in the rain, and Elijah is the billowing, acrid smoke that comes from it, but she is the wisps that twist in the wind.

Let me tell you the story of a man with stones for eyes and a girl who leapt through time. He chases her for a hundred, three hundred, five hundred years, and sometimes—_sometimes_—they meet in the middle, with blood in their throats and ash in their mouth. Not very romantic, Katherine says with a cynical little smile, and Lila huddles in the corner (hands trembling, scarf unravelled at her feet), but it works.

Sometimes he reminds her of the girl she used to be, Katherine says, her heels echoing through the room as she steps closer. Sharp knitting needles glint in her hand. Sometimes he touches the girl, this man, this hunter, and she lets him.

Lila dismantles before her, and Katherine's smile grows. This man takes and takes, pulls her apart and picks her raw, and she realizes too late that he is not a man. Katherine pauses in the middle of her story, index finger circling the sharp point of the needle, and her steps falter. What he is, she can't quite say.

This girl, Katherine says, and makes up for the slight trembling in her hands with her the smooth wine of her voice.

You mean _you_, Lila whispers, eyes wet, eyes sad.

Me, Katherine says, her smile twisting, her heart contorting. It's almost painful. She doesn't bother correcting Lila.

I'll never let him catch me, Katherine says, a low rasp. She raises high the hand wrapped tight around the knitting needle, and for the briefest of moments before she brings her hand down she can see it all: the barefoot peasant girl with nettles in her hair, mountains blue in the distance.

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**fin**


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